Thursday, October 29, 2015

Media as a bunch of lame, dishonest, left-wing attack dogs

Yesterday, CNBC hosted the Republican debate before the primaries.

It was supposed to be a confrontation between the GOP candidates themselves and a comparison of their policies. Instead, it unavoidably morphed into a battle between politicians who care about the essence on one side; and demagogic superficial hostile journalists on the other side.

Ted Cruz has summarized the juvenile behavior of the would-be moderators most eloquently:

The questions basically were: Trump, are you a comic book villain? Carson, can you do math? Rubio, why won't you resign? Bush, why have your numbers fallen? The "moderators" were competing in pissing on the politicians. The comparison of the hosts' behavior in the Republican and Democratic debate reveals a huge asymmetry.

CNBC presents itself as a TV station run by professionals. It should simply fire all the aggressive demagogues from political programs because they completely lack the integrity and intelligence for this kind of work. They should be replaced by someone who actually knows the issues, cares about them, and can maximally use the time for the debate to extract the relevant and interesting views and plans from the candidates.

Is it so much to ask that CNBC should actually have some people who are not only able to behave equally decently in the debates of both major parties; but hosts who actually know the most important detailed differences between the candidates and may focus on them? The primaries exist in order for each party to pick its best or most viable nominee for the presidential elections. So some superficial expression of the opinion that "Democrats are handsome and Republicans are ugly" doesn't belong to the primaries.

I think that a good journalist should be able to do an equally good job of this kind in both primaries. But if he's not, well, CNBC needs to have a Republican-friendly host. And if it isn't employing folks like that at all, well, then it shouldn't ever host Republican debates. It should better stop making programs about politics altogether because it's pretty much incompetent in that business.

Organizations like CNBC, MSNBC, and many others are just hopeless cesspools. They don't have any people capable of running Republican debates – or any other sensible enough debates – because only people compatible with the pro-left-wing activism of these media organizations can get employed. Their culture is completely biased. The stations constantly emit lots of low-brow demagogic stuff about evil conservatives, debt that doesn't matter, global warming, and all similar rubbish and the only debate they would sometimes allow is a debate between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, as Ted Cruz described two subgroups of the leftists.

America obviously maintains its two-party system but huge portions of the country – including almost all the media and almost all the universities, not to mention almost all the NGOs and even almost all the companies in certain industries – are already (or still) mentally living in a very different kind of a world, one that is not too different from the world we Central and Eastern Europeans inhabited up to 1989. It's a world with an official ideology with prescribed "correct" priorities and opinions about everything in which everyone whose views differ has to be ostracized, attacked, character assassinated, humiliated, vilified, demonized, stigmatized, silenced, professionally liquidated, and – in some cases – physically liquidated.

Sorry but democratic systems work differently. If you actually want to defend some views and policies and be the active player in the debates, you have to run, dear hosts (or ex-hosts, as I recommend below). You have to run, defeat Hillary (probably not the GOP folks!) and her comrades and then beat the Republican nominee. If you're not running and you're employed as a journalist, your job is something entirely different.

I urge CNBC to fire the hosts who have failed so miserably and apologize to all of its intelligent viewers, even if their number is small. 14 million people have watched that program; many of them must have noticed that the hosts' behavior was insulting.